the making of hong kong from vertical to volumetric planning history and environment series

Download Book The Making Of Hong Kong From Vertical To Volumetric Planning History And Environment Series in PDF format. You can Read Online The Making Of Hong Kong From Vertical To Volumetric Planning History And Environment Series here in PDF, EPUB, Mobi or Docx formats.

This book investigates what the history of Hong Kong’s urban development has to teach other cities as they face environmental challenges, social and demographic change and the need for new models of dense urbanism. The authors describe how the high-rise intensity of Hong Kong came about; how the forest of towers are in fact vertical culs de sac; and how the city might become truly ‘volumetric’ with mixed activities through multiple levels and 3D movement networks incorporating ‘town cubes’ rather than town squares. For more information, visit the authors' website: http://www.makingofhk.com/makingofhk.swf

Japanese cities are amongst the most intriguing and confounding anywhere. Their structures, patterns of building and broader visual characteristics defy conventional urban design theories, and the book explores why this is so. Like its cities, Japan’s written language is recognized as one of the most complicated, and the book is unique in revealing how the two are closely related. Set perceptively against a sweep of ideas drawn from history, geography, science, cultural and design theory, Learning from the Japanese City is a highly original exploration of contemporary urbanism that crosses disciplines, scales, time and space. This is a thoroughly revised and much extended version of a book that drew extensive praise in its first edition. Most parts have stood the test of time and remain. A few are replaced or removed; about a hundred figures appear for the first time. Most important is an entirely new (sixth) section. This brings together many of the urban characteristics, otherwise encountered in fragments through the book, in one walkable district of what is arguably Japan’s most convenient metropolis, Nagoya. The interplay between culture, built form and cities remains at the heart of this highly readable book, while a change in subtitle to Looking East in Urban Design reflects increased emphasis on real places and design implications.

As the Regional Plan Association embarks on a Fourth Regional Plan, there can be no better time for a paperback edition of David Johnson’s critically acclaimed assessment of the 1929 Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs. As he says in his preface to this edition, the questions faced by the regional planners of today are little changed from those their predecessors faced in the 1920s. Derided by some, accused by others of being the root cause of New York City’s relative economic and physical decline, the 1929 Plan was in reality an important source of ideas for many projects built during the New Deal era of the 1930s. In his detailed examination of the Plan, Johnson traces its origins to Progressive era and Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. He describes the making of the Plan under the direction of Scotsman Thomas Adams, its reception in the New York Region, and its partial realization. The story he tells has important lessons for planners, decision-makers and citizens facing an increasingly urban future where the physical plan approach may again have a critical role to play.

On 17 October 1989 one the largest earthquakes to occur in California since the San Francisco earthquake of April 1906 struck Northern California. Damage was extensive, none more so than the partial collapse of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge’s eastern span, a vital link used by hundreds of thousands of Californians every day. The bridge was closed for a month for repairs and then reopened to traffic. But what ensued over the next 25 years is the extraordinary story that Karen Trapenberg Frick tells here. It is a cautionary tale to which any governing authority embarking on a megaproject should pay heed. She describes the process by which the bridge was eventually replaced as an exercise in shadowboxing which pitted the combined talents and shortcomings, partnerships and jealousies, ingenuity and obtuseness, generosity and parsimony of the State’s and the region’s leading elected officials, engineers, architects and other members of the governing elites against a collectively imagined future catastrophe of unknown proportions. In so doing she highlights three key questions: If safety was the reason to replace the bridge, why did it take almost 25 years to do so? How did an original estimate of $250 million in 1995 soar to $6.5 billion by 2014? And why was such a complex design chosen? Her final chapter – part epilogue, part reflection – provides recommendations to improve megaproject delivery and design.

In this book Arturo Almandoz places the major episodes of Latin America’s twentieth and early twenty-first century urban history within the changing relationship between industrialization and urbanization, modernization and development. This relationship began in the early twentieth century, when industrialization and urbanization became significant in the region, and ends at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when new tensions between liberal globalization and populist nationalism challenge development in the subcontinent, much of which is still poverty stricken. Latin America’s twentieth-century modernization and development are closely related to nineteenth-century ideals of progress and civilization, and for this reason Almandoz opens with a brief review of that legacy for the different countries that are the focus of his book – Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela – but with references to others. He then explores the regional distortions, which resulted from the interaction between industrialization and urbanization, and how the imbalance between urbanization and the productive system helps to explain why ‘take-off’ was not followed by the ‘drive to maturity’ in Latin American countries. He suggests that the close yet troublesome relationship with the United States, the recurrence of dictatorships and autocratic regimes, and Marxist influences in many domains, are all factors that explain Latin America’s stagnation and underdevelopment up to the so-called ‘lost decade’ of 1980s. He shows how Latin America’s fate changed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, when neoliberal programmes, political compromise and constitutional reform dismantled the traditional model of the corporate state and centralized planning. He reveals how economic growth and social improvements have been attained by politically left-wing yet economically open-market countries while others have resumed populism and state intervention. All these trends make up the complex scenario for the new century – especially when considered against the background of vibrant metropolises that are the main actors in the book.

Hong Kong is the twenty-first-century paradigmatic capital of consumerism. Of all places, it has the densest and tallest concentration of malls, reaching tens of stories. Hong Kong’s malls are also the most visited, sandwiched between subways and skyscrapers. These mall complexes have become cities in and of themselves, accommodating tens of thousands of people who live, work, and play within a single structure. Mall City features Hong Kong as a unique rendering of an advanced consumer society. Retail space has come a long way since the nineteenth-century covered passages of Paris, which once awed the bourgeoisie with glass roofs and gaslights. It has morphed from the arcade to the department store, and from the mall into the “mall city”—where “expresscalators” crisscross mesmerizing atriums. Highlighting the effects of this development in Hong Kong, this book raises questions about architecture, city planning, culture, and urban life. “At the nexus of density, humidity, topography, and prosperity, Hong Kong has spawned more malls per square mile than any place on earth. This fantastic book decodes and graphically depicts an environment both apart and ubiquitous, a convulsive form of public space in a liquid territory where intensely contested politics, commerce, and sociability weirdly merge in a city like no other.” —Michael Sorkin, distinguished professor of architecture of the City University of New York “Hong Kong may be packed with the most shopping malls per square kilometer in the world, but Mall City is packed with the most drawings, information, and fascinating mall facts. The book dissects, categorizes, and displays all kinds of intriguing data on the city-state’s shopping complexes and culture. Its richly layered analysis perfectly matches Hong Kong’s multi-story machines for consumption.” —Clifford Pearson, director of USC American Academy in China “Stefan Al has again produced a book that provides a sharp lens on radically new urban forms that are emerging in China. While his previous books, Villages in the City andFactory Towns of South China introduced the site of production and housing for the migrant labor of the Pearl River Delta, here we enter the phantasmagoria of the enormous interconnected free-trade shopping zone of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Mall City dissects the basic unit of this climate-controlled consumer landscape—the mall. This beautifully illustrated book is a must-read for those who wish to understand the future of public space in high-density cities.” —Brian McGrath, professor of urban design and dean of constructed environments, Parsons School of Design

A revolutionary reimagining of the cities we live in, the air above us, and what goes on in the earth beneath our feet Today we live in a world that can no longer be read as a two-dimensional map, but must now be understood as a series of vertical strata that reach from the satellites that encircle our planet to the tunnels deep within the ground. In Vertical, Stephen Graham rewrites the city at every level: how the geography of inequality, politics, and identity is determined in terms of above and below. Starting at the edge of earth’s atmosphere and, in a series of riveting studies, descending through each layer, Graham explores the world of drones, the city from the viewpoint of an aerial bomber, the design of sidewalks and the hidden depths of underground bunkers. He asks: why was Dubai built to be seen from Google Earth? How do the super-rich in São Paulo live in their penthouses far above the street? Why do London billionaires build vast subterranean basements? And how do the technology of elevators and subversive urban explorers shape life on the surface and subsurface of the earth? Vertical will make you look at the world around you anew: this is a revolution in understanding your place in the world.

"The vertical farm is a world-changing innovation whose time has come. Dickson Despommier's visionary book provides a blueprint for securing the world's food supply and at the same time solving one of the gravest environmental crises facing us today."--Sting Imagine a world where every town has their own local food source, grown in the safest way possible, where no drop of water or particle of light is wasted, and where a simple elevator ride can transport you to nature's grocery store - imagine the world of the vertical farm. When Columbia professor Dickson Despommier set out to solve America's food, water, and energy crises, he didn't just think big - he thought up. Despommier's stroke of genius, the vertical farm, has excited scientists, architects, and politicians around the globe. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Despommier explains how the vertical farm will have an incredible impact on changing the face of this planet for future generations. Despommier takes readers on an incredible journey inside the vertical farm, buildings filled with fruits and vegetables that will provide local food sources for entire cities. Vertical farms will allow us to: - Grow food 24 hours a day, 365 days a year - Protect crops from unpredictable and harmful weather - Re-use water collected from the indoor environment - Provide jobs for residents - Eliminate use of pesticides, fertilizers, or herbicides - Drastically reduce dependence on fossil fuels - Prevent crop loss due to shipping or storage - Stop agricultural runoff Vertical farms can be built in abandoned buildings and on deserted lots, transforming our cities into urban landscapes which will provide fresh food grown and harvested just around the corner. Possibly the most important aspect of vertical farms is that they can built by nations with little or no arable land, transforming nations which are currently unable to farm into top food producers. In the tradition of the bestselling The World Without Us, The Vertical Farm is a completely original landmark work destined to become an instant classic.

Asian Urbanization surveys the most significant facets of Hong Kong's remarkable urban development during the last twenty-five years. Some of the contributions, by authors from both the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Government, were originally given at a series of seminars on problems of urbanization held in the Centre of Asian Studies of the University of Hong Kong. In this up-to-date form they provide a comprehensive survey of the problems of physical planning in Hong Kong and, on a comparative basis, in Asia and elsewhere. The wide scope of the book includes studies of the massive housing programmes for the resettlement of squatters which have attracted such international attention; the legal background to urban growth; urban renewal; the transport pattern and recent proposals for an undergroundmass-transport rail system, small-scale industrial units, and the creation of new towns- all extensively illustrated with detailed plates, maps and diagrams. Hong Kong's pattern of urban development is perhaps the most dynamic in the Third World and this assessment, which may in parts prove to be controversial, should be read by all those concerned with the planning of the rapidly expanding cities of developing countries and by students of comparative urbanization everywhere.